This is one of those days that cries out for Mark Twain. Not the jovial old squire of Hartford, but the dark, brooding skeptic who saw human nature as an impenetrable jungle full of disease and invisible predators, the guy who asked, "Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes its laws or its songs either." Because this is the day in which the denizens of the epistemically closed hallucinatory menagerie of the political right become reality. The conjuring words finally have worked. The black spirits of the conservative imagination walk the landscape, making news.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

First, today is the day that Sidney Blumenthal faces the House committee chaired by Trey Gowdy to answer some questions about...something related to Benghazi, Benghazi!, BENGHAZI! Blumenthal, of course, is a mythical figure within the conservative info-bubble, someone who personifies all those things, real and imagined, but mostly imagined, that the Clintons always Get Away With. During the Great Penis Hunt of 1998, Blumenthal allegedly was the sorcerer behind the administration's responses. Conservative parents used him to frighten their children into their beds at night. It was the triumph of belief over reason, a victory for cult-thinking. Ironically, in his The Rise Of The Counter-Establishment, Blumenthal called this trick almost 30 years ago. Writing about the explosive growth of the conservative intellectual infrastructure, Blumenthal pointed out that, "They imitated something they had imagined,but what they created was not imaginary."

So, Gowdy's snipe-hunters get a shot at him today, in closed session, alas, because there likely is 20 years of investigative jackassery built up behind the committee table like water behind a crumbling dam. The New York Times desperately tries to pick gold out of the aging manure.

The emails from Mr. Blumenthal have widened a rift between the State Department and the committee. State Department officials said that they had complied only with requests and subpoenas related directly to the attacks because the committee's demands were too broad. The department has "provided the committee with a subset of documents that matched its request and will continue to work with them going forward," said a spokesman, Alec Gerlach. But the panel has called that an excuse to protect Mrs. Clinton and to slow the investigation of the attacks, which occurred on Sept. 11, 2012, and resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.

This is the seventh congressional investigation into those events. The previous six all have exonerated Hillary Rodham Clinton and the State Department of any wrongdoing while being properly critical of the security failures that resulted in the death of the four Americans. Ultimately, we're still talking about what Susan Rice said on a Sunday Show, but talk to enough people on the right, and they will tell you that it was Sidney Blumenthal throwing his voice.

And then, of course, there is Donald Trump, who will actively pretend to run for president this time around, and who announced his intentions in a speech that apparently was written by elves who learned English 20 minutes before Trump walked on stage.

"Politicians are all talk, no action. Nothing is going to get done. They will not bring us, believe me, to the promise land. They will not. I've been on the circuit making speeches and I hear my fellow Republicans — and they're wonderful people, I like them! They all want me to support them! — ... I watch the speeches of these people and they say, 'The sun will rise, the moon will set! All sorts of wonderful things will happen!'"

Personally, I think saying that the sun will rise and the moon will set are two of the easiest campaign promises to keep ever. (They might confuse Bill O'Reilly, however.) Then again, I don't own a Gucci store that's worth more than Mitt Romney, so what do I know, anyway? Trump's vaguely paragraph-like globs of words were shot through with magical spells. There's this doctor he knows who doesn't like the Affordable Care Act. There's this manufacturer he knows who's having trouble with China. They all call Trump -- perhaps through his bridgework, perhaps not -- and unburden themselves on him because they know that Trump is the person who can solve their problems because he is a problem-solver on the art of the deal, the four bankruptcies notwithstanding.

He is the inevitable result of 40 years of political conjuring, mainly by Republicans, but abetted by far too many Democrats as well. He is the inevitable product of anyone who ever argued that our political institutions should be run "like a business." (Like whose businesses? Like Trump's? Like Carly Fiorina's Hewlett Packard?) He is the inevitable product of anyone who ever argued why the government can't balance its books "the way any American family would." He is the inevitable result of the deregulated economy that was deregulated out of a well-cultivated wonder and awe directed at the various masters of the universe. Sooner or later, all of this misbegotten magical thinking was going to burp up a clown like Donald Trump. Sooner or later, the conversion of the institutions of the national legislature into vehicles for polite ratfcking was going to burp up a Trey Gowdy, who will interrogate not the actual Sid Blumenthal, but the one that exists in thousands of fundraising letters and chain e-mails. The politics of this country have dedicated themselves to the pursuit of hallucinations today. Wish I could say I was surprised.